The AI ‘greaseman’ strikes out on his own

Lindsey Quinn

31 Jan 2018

If there’s a large-scale AI undertaking in the works, it’s likely that Andrew Ng has had a hand in it.

To put it in Ocean’s Eleven terms, he’s the go-to “greaseman” for big tech companies looking to solve some of the biggest questions in AI. AKA, he can weasel his way around any deep learning obstacle out there.

Now, Ng has big guns like NEA, Sequoia, Greylock, and (of course) SoftBank on board — all attracted by his promise that AI businesses are “more repeatable than people think,” and that he can build them faster than anyone.

To that end, the fund will operate more as an incubator for Ng’s projects, rather than an investing arm for outside startups.

Ng’s been grooming the talent — now he has the resources to recruit

Ng’s already launched Deeplearning.ai, an online curriculum of classes on things like “deep neural networks” to fill the shortage of AI engineers, which has made it notoriously difficult to get deep learning startups off the ground.

But, niche engineers don’t come cheap — and with this extra funding, he’ll actually be able to pay their $500k salaries.